Seventieth Internet Marketing Podcast July 22nd 2010. First page of Show Notes

Responding to Google Places Reviews

Paul:He would send those and I’m like, “No, I didn’t respond to the other 15 you sent me.”

Chris:Yeah.

Paul:God, I don’t get the point.

Chris:Yeah, maybe Facebook needs to keep track of how many things you ignore and then start creating a profile of okay, this dude is going to ignore everything so let’s kick him off.

Paul:Thank you.

Chris:[Laughter] Facebook shut down dude inactivity. All right. The next thing I got is actually Darren Booy’s letter.

Paul:Yeah. Let’s run into that.

Chris:This is pretty cool.

Paul:Link frenzy.

Chris:Slink frenzy. That’s the subject. So apparently, Darren was in Portugal. We missed you for ten days so that could have been two podcasts we missed you for, and we’re happy to have you back. Oh, by the way, if you want to send an email to us or stalk us or find us or whatever, here are the plethora of ways we have available for you. Typically, at 9:15 Central Standard Time on Friday mornings, today is Thursday morning ’cause we’re kind of shut down for tomorrow, at least a couple of us. So 9:15 Central Standard Time on Friday mornings you can find us. The easiest way to get there is to go to e-webstyle.com/USTREAM. That’s the letter USTREAM. That will take you immediately to our USTREAM page where you can see us broadcasting live immediately.

The other ways that you can follow us — twitter.com/ewebstyle. No dash in the ewebstyle. Facebook.com/ewebstyle. No dash in the ewebstyle. E-webstyle.com/YouTube. That’s YouTube for you in the dark ages. That will take you to our YouTube page. We’ve got a cool little animated video with Paul in a bird hat and me with a speaker Princess Leia ears.

Paul:Speaker ears.

Chris:So go check that out. We also have the secret. It’s a short like three-minute secret to how we accomplish everything we do as quickly as we do here. So go check that out.

Paul:We ought to put all that on like a page.

Chris:On a page?

Paul:We have like a million ways to contact. We have to put them on the page.

Chris:Should I just add that to the list of things we need to do for ourselves and not for clients?

Paul:[Laughter]

Chris:We’re like that mechanic who drives the broken down piece of crap car ’cause he doesn’t get paid to fix his car. He gets paid to make sure other people are succeeding in their businesses and we’re doing fine in our business.

Paul:Link frenzy.

Chris:Link frenzy, yeah. So quick point on what Paul said in podcast number 68. Apparently, Paul said something about Google Places. Darren Booy actually has two businesses in the same Google Places location. Same phone number.

Paul:Darren, hook me up.

Chris:I think it’s Europe.

Paul:Oh, God dang.

Chris:Yeah.

Paul:Because I am in this battle with Google right now over three different businesses on businesses, same phone number, same address. Email me. Hook me up, man. I figured other than give me a European address.

Chris:Put us in contact with the Google person you have a stroke with ’cause we could use that.

Paul:Please.

Chris:And so what you were saying ’cause we’ve talked about this about three podcasts ago, actually number 68 apparently is that a differ
ent suite number is not working.

Paul:I haven’t heard back actually. I’m still being reviewed.

Chris:Okay, wow.

Paul:So I don’t know. Darren, if you have any tips, man, I sincerely appreciate it other than the fact that I should probably move to Europe if I want to do that, but I have not been able — anyone with a duplicate address or phone number gets under review.

Chris:Well, I think Darren, what I would suggest preemptively ’cause it probably doesn’t have that much cost is get another phone number that’s forwarded maybe to your same line and put some sort of suite number or apartment number or whatever on it so that when Google’s initial software — ’cause I imagine they’re going to turn that on for Europe. ‘Cause it kind of makes sense if — a perfect example, we would like each of our customers who can do business from Houston to be housed end up putting the quote symbols up out of our office because then, it’s going to do well for them in Houston and Google Places. And that’s not doing good by the Google customer, the Google Search user. So Google is going to put a stop to that pretty quickly.

So it kind of sucks because we all know that there are multiple businesses run out of multiple locations, but if it only means that you have to get an extra phone number and kind of tweak the suite. So we’re in Suite 106 here. We have another business listed here so we’re going to put 106A and 106B and have a different phone number. I think that should work.

Paul:I hope so. It’s under review and hasn’t actually changed it.

Chris:So now my song is changed to where my review at?

Paul:Thank you.

Chris:Where my review at?

Paul:And that’s been under review for like two weeks.

Chris:What’s taking so long? I’m going to stop rapping. So we got some news regarding — okay, so we did a podcast a while back. Darren Booy did one long page. All of his content was on one page and he’d have little anchors that would jump down when you click the different tabs. And we kind of recommended, “Hey, you probably don’t want to do that because individual pages will be handled separately.” Excuse me. I don’t even know why I’m yawning. Maybe because I’m tired. And what he said is that he read that if you had different H1 tags, those are header tags, that that would break up a particular page. I think that’s probably true. I mean, it makes sense. I think some of the challenge you have is potentially for Google getting confused about what information is on what page.

So if you have a page and I know you do SEO over there in Eindhoven, if you’ve got a page that’s focused on SEO, then you want all you SEO anchor text links coming to that SEO page. In your case, it will be coming to your homepage. And then you would also have your web design coming to your homepage. So Google, you’re going to be diluting your inbound anchor Google juice from one subject to another. So I would still recommend that you separate those.

But I love the experiment. Keep it up. It looks like you’re doing well. You say you only launched it three weeks ago. The website is creative-dynamics.eu and for Web Designer Eindhoven and Web Design Eindhoven, you’re doing well and you’re on the first page, second position for SEO Eindhoven. So that’s pretty cool.

Paul:That’s what’s up.

Chris:Yeah. And, you know, I really appreciate these notes. He is saying that I need a runner for the podcast so I don’t lose my scripts.

Paul:[Laughter] That would be awesome.

Chris:And they could bring me coffee and coke.

Paul:That’s what’s up.

Chris:I remember that’s Diet Coke and this time it’s actually Diet Pepsi. And he asked me how am I at jayQuery. I could be kind hawking and go “Jay what?” except I know about it and I suck at it. I’ve never even touched it so. You know, let’s say this. I’m brilliant at it. I’ve never touched it and I don’t. I don’t really have the time. But yeah, send me a note. What are you doing with jayQuery? That’s kind of cool. I know it’s a pretty powerful stuff. It’s a way to do interactive stuff very dynamic and it is kind of — I believe Ajax technology so you don’t actually have to leave the webpage to actually grab information from a database or from your server.

So Darren Booy, as usual, we really appreciate your correspondence. And the challenge is still out there. I think we put together the bird hat and speaker Princess Leila animation. Apparently, you accepted the challenged and worked at least 10 days into it. Should we give him the slack ’cause he was in Portugal?

Paul:I’m going to pass ’cause he was in Portugal.

Chris:He was in Portugal, so hopefully he saw some good software over there. Obrigado! That’s what he finished with. Muitos obrigado! Which I just figured out because he was in Portugal. So you know what? I’m done. That’s all I got.

Paul:Oh, I got a little something else. Google Places. This probably I guess is a news bit. That’s just something I just read. If you’re not on Google Places, get on it. Google Places, you know, like where you can put your local business listing on Google. They now let businesses respond to reviews on Google places. This is something I printed out actually from SearchEngineLand. Starting today, if you’re a verified Google Places business owner, you can publicly respond to reviews written by Google Maps users on the place page of your business if you are verified. So if you’re having verification issues with getting verified, you need to get that handled. I am still having some of those same issues.

Chris:I do have a note on that. It’s pretty interesting. It maybe in parallel with what you’re about to say. Google has incorporated Yelp and City Search reviews and — okay, go ahead.

Paul:Yeah. It’s actually a part of it. And here’s the thing. So basically, you can respond to it. They actually offer a guide to how to respond to reviews, both positive and negative. They actually recommend that you respond to reviews positive and negative. Now, there are some limitations.

Chris:So I guess without even reading it, I can tell you a bad response for a negative review is “That guy sucked anyway.”

Paul:Yeah, I know.

Chris:He is no longer allowed in our establishment.

Paul:Yeah. Now, their limitation is business owners do not get to respond to all reviews that appear on Places pages, i.e., those from third party sources, only those written by Google users directly at Google. To my understanding, I think like depending on that particular review, but like up to half the reviews that come from Google Places come from third party sites.

Chris:I think it’s even more. I don’t know that many people are using Google Places.

Paul:I don’t think so either. They’re trying to push it.

Chris:Probably the people who are using it are people who are actually writing reviews of themselves in Google Places.

Paul:Probably so. They are really trying to push Google Places reviews. I know that. I’ve read that a while back. And they are going to drop City Search and Yelp and they get from yellowpages.com, City Search, and a bunch of different places.

Chris:By the way, if you wrote your own review and it was bad, really just you need to close that job.

Paul:Yeah, really. So this tells me Google is really trying to push Google Places. They want their own reviews. And we’ve talked about reviews a million times. You want to get reviews and you want to respond to your reviews, positive and negative. There’s a tool that helps you do that.

Chris:And you want to include reviews on your website, testimonials, and I’m sure we’ve talked in some of our podcasts. If not, now we are. We’re about to that you want testimonials on each of your pages. You don’t want a page of testimonials and you don’t want click here to go see testimonials because our experience is that people don’t do that. So just make — and you want them short. You don’t want like a five — even though it’s nice that somebody took the time to write five paragraphs about how wonderful your business and services, that’s not what people want to read when they want to read a testimonial. They want to read like the bullet point. Wow, they were awesome. They were on time. They delivered everything they promised and I would definitely recommend them. That’s it. Keep it short.

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